confront Churchill, his friend and rival in rhetorical fireworks, twenty-six years later. For the moment, Lloyd George is the master. Contemporary accounts record the spell in which he held his audience bound. His voice was rich and resonant where Churchill’s was reedy. The notion that Churchill had a stutter is a myth, but he certainly had a lisp, which meant that he struggled with sibilant sounds. Churchill, though, had one big advantage: his wartime speeches enjoy world renown, while Lloyd George’s are largely lost to posterity. No one can outdo Churchill as a war speaker. Lloyd George at his best stands second-best, but we have no recordings of what he said. As Kenneth Morgan has put it: ‘Churchill spoke to history; Lloyd George spoke only to his listeners.’ The speech was covered in newspapers and distributed as a pamphlet. Far more people would have read than heard it, but the fact remains that Churchill had the wireless and Lloyd George didn’t.
There is one more parallel between the two, which concerns the question of truth. Lloyd George judiciously refuses to swallow every story about the depravity of German soldiers. By acknowledging the likelihood of propaganda, he positions himself on higher moral ground. Yet the perilous circumstances of wartime mean there is something in the accusation that rhetoric skirts close to untruth. As Churchill will do in the House of Commons in 1940, Lloyd George is not giving a merely factual account of the status of the war effort. That would be too pessimistic for his purpose, which is to inspire confidence in ultimate victory. It is not untrue; but nor is it altogether true.
Russia has a special regard for Serbia. She has a special interest in Serbia. Russians have shed their blood for Serbian independence many a time. Serbia is a member of her family, and she cannot see Serbia maltreated. Austria knew that. Germany knew that, and Germany turned round to Russia and said: ‘Here, I insist that you shall stand by with your arms folded whilst Austria is strangling to death your little brother. So lay your hands on that little fellow, and I will tear your ramshackle Empire limb from limb.’ And he is doing it! That is the story of the little nations. The world owes much to little nations – and to little men. This theory of bigness – you must have a big empire and a big nation, and a big man – well, long legs have their advantage in a retreat. Frederick the Great chose his warriors for their height, and that tradition has become a policy in Germany. Germany applies that ideal to nations; she will only allow six-feet-two nations to stand in the ranks. But all the world owes much to the little five feet high nations. The greatest art of the world was the work of little nations. The most enduring literature of the world came from little nations. The greatest literature of England came from her when she was a nation of the size of Belgium fighting a great Empire. The heroic deeds that thrill humanity through generations were the deeds of little nations fighting for their freedom!
Transcripts record the huge number of occasions on which this speech was interrupted by hisses, laughter, cheers, applause and shouts of hear, hear. Audiences then were more demonstrative than they would be now, and Lloyd George turns parts of the address into call and response. Standing alone to speak can be a lonely event; it is comforting to hear periodic appreciation. Applause also creates an atmosphere. The end of this section is a classic ‘clap line’, signalled even in Lloyd George’s script with an exclamation mark. Poor speakers try to rouse the audience with only a rising intonation and an increased volume at the end of a line, but the applause will only ever be resounding when the vocal trickery is deployed for an important, completed thought.
Lloyd George’s mastery of technique is displayed by the way he conjures grave days in demotic vocabulary and strikingly familiar imagery. A vast body of research attests to the capacity of humans to recall mind-pictures much quicker than abstract arguments. A congruent image allows us to recall the argument for which it stands. Russia as a brother standing, with his arms folded, while his brother was attacked, will allow the audience to recall why passive quiescence is not possible. The diminutive Lloyd George – himself notoriously less than five feet tall – then goes into a comic riff that verges on the absurd, describing big countries as the ‘six foot two’ nations and the smaller nations as ‘the five feet high’ nations. It leads him to a paean to the great literary achievements of Britain and a convenient omission of the fact that, though Britain may have been a small nation in the days of Shakespeare, she did go on, within living memory of most people in the audience, to became the world’s biggest empire.
Have you read the Kaiser’s speeches? If you have not a copy, I advise you to buy it; they will soon be out of print, and you won’t have any more of the same sort again. They are full of the clatter and bluster of German militarists – the mailed fist, the shining armour. Poor old mailed fist – its knuckles are getting a little bruised. Poor shining armour – the shine is being knocked out of it. But there is the same swagger and boastfulness running through the whole of the speeches … I do not believe he meant all these speeches. It was simply the martial straddle which he had acquired; but there were men around him who meant every word of it … You know the type of motorist, the terror of the roads, with a 60-h.p. car. He thinks the roads are made for him, and anybody who impedes the action of his car by a single mile is knocked down. The Prussian junker is the road-hog of Europe. Small nationalities in his way hurled to the roadside, bleeding and broken; women and children crushed under the wheels of his cruel car. Britain ordered out of his road. All I can say is this: if the old British spirit is alive in British hearts, that bully will be torn from his seat. Were he to win it would be the greatest catastrophe that has befallen democracy since the days of the Holy Alliance and its ascendancy. They think we cannot beat them. It will not be easy. It will be a long job. It will be a terrible war. But in the end we shall march through terror to triumph.
It is a mark of how seriously Lloyd George is taking the enemy that he opts for mockery. The clatter and the bluster, the mailed fist with bruised knuckles. He can get away with this because the speech is tightly argued, rich with historical examples. However, this is an example of how even a skilled writer can get carried away. Suggesting that the Prussians are the road-hog of Europe sounds quaint to us now. In fact, this reference was the height of modernity at the time. The motor car was a recent introduction to the streets of European cities. Mr Toad had been born in 1908, in The Wind in the Willows. Five years before Lloyd George gave his speech a poster had greeted travellers into London with a lament for the loss of employment and a claim that the newfangled motors would kill ‘your children, dogs and chickens’ and ‘spoil your clothes with dust’. It was posted by the horse-and-cart lobby trying to stop the march of change. Lloyd George is therefore conjuring a fear of modernity, the idea that the Prussians are perverting the advance of science, using knowledge to illicit ends. It is, in other words, rather like Wagner’s music: less bad than it sounds.
However, with that defence entered, it’s all too stretched. By the time Lloyd George imagines turfing the Prussian bully out of the seat of the car, we feel that it is running away from him, to adopt his own metaphor. It also fails to set the mood for what follows, which is the necessary chorus of any war speech – the regular reminder that we, the forces of good, will prevail. A driver being taken off the road does not prepare us for the greatest catastrophe faced by democracy since the days of the Holy Alliance.
Those who have fallen have consecrated deaths. They have taken their part in the making of a new Europe, a new world. I can see signs of its coming in the glare of the battlefield. The people will gain more by this struggle in all lands than they comprehend at the present moment. It is true they will be rid of the menace to their freedom. But that is not all. There is something infinitely greater and more enduring which is emerging already out of this great conflict; a new patriotism, richer, nobler, more exalted than the old. I see a new recognition amongst all classes, high and low, shedding themselves of selfishness; a new recognition that the honour of a country does not depend merely on the maintenance of its glory in the stricken field, but in protecting its homes from distress as well. It is a new patriotism, it is bringing a new outlook for all classes. A great flood of luxury and of sloth which had submerged the land is receding, and a new Britain is appearing. We can see for the first time the fundamental things that matter in life and that have been obscured from our vision by the tropical growth of prosperity.
The speaker at a time of
